Same Time Next Year(28)

I take a gulping breath and climb out of the car, trying to pretend like my pulse isn’t pumping like a jet engine. “Hi. I’m Britta.” I stick a clammy hand out toward the closest sister for a shake, and I’m pulled into a back-slapping bear hug instead. “Oh!” I manage, though my windpipe is being crushed. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

“I’m Syd. The one holding the kid is Chrissy. We’ve got two more sisters back home, but one is too knocked up to fly, and the other just started a new job. They’re demanding pictures of you, so don’t get alarmed if I start snapping away like a stalker.”

“Oh, no, I don’t mind—”

“Out of the way! Let me get a look at my daughter-in-law,” booms Sumner’s mother, elbowing her way into the fray and then jerking me into a swaying embrace. “My son hasn’t stopped talking about you since we arrived.”

“Mom,” complains Sumner from somewhere in the group, but everyone is crowded too close for me to see him. “Enough. You’re scaring her.”

“I own a bar where half the clientele are hockey players,” I mutter, craning my neck to search for him. “I don’t scare that easy.”

Everyone laughs.

“What is that in the back seat?” inquires Syd. “Looks like food.”

“I love food.” This, from one of the husbands.

“It’s . . . nothing. Really.” I block the rear window with my body, self-doubt creeping into my throat. “I forgot to bring it inside last night. From the bar. A customer brought it in—”

“Nope. Looks hot.”

“Oh, well . . . you know how powerful Tupperware can be . . .”

“Soup.” Sumner’s father inspects the container through the window and nods, making eye contact with everyone. “That’s definitely soup.”

All right, I have to own this. Why didn’t I taste it, though? Huge oversight.

“Okay. Yes.” A swallow gets stuck in my throat, but it dislodges when Sumner finally moves into view, his chest lifting and plummeting when he sees me. Several emotions roam across his features. Relief, yearning, possessiveness. Britta, he mouths, coming toward me while glancing between me and the back seat. “I guess I made . . . like, I don’t know. It’s broccoli cheddar soup?”

There is a collective gasp from the assemblage.

“Oh God. What?” I search the faces of the group. “Did someone else already make it?”

“No.” Sumner’s mother sniffs and draws me back into a hug. “You made my son’s favorite food, that’s all. It’s appreciated.”

“That soup is a bitch to make,” points out Chrissy, looking impressed.

“That’s like ten thousand brownie points,” says one of the husbands.

“Respect.”

Sumner has been walking toward me slowly, as if in a trance, and now he blocks everyone and everything out with his ridiculous size. I inhale the sight of him, this man who has occupied my every waking thought since the last time I saw him, standing in my bedroom looking so fierce and frustrated and . . . sure of me. Sure of us. “You made me soup, sweetheart?”

It is a powerful thing, the way my heart begins to hang glide around my chest as soon as he’s close to me. “It’s probably terrible.”

“You remembered. And you made it. There’s no way it’s terrible.”

“Why is everyone so quiet?” I whisper.

Sumner reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “My grandma used to make broccoli cheddar soup. No one has made it since she passed. It was her thing.”

“Now it’s your thing,” said Sumner’s mother. “Britta’s famous broccoli cheddar.”

“This calls for a live taste test,” Syd yells. “Someone go get a spoon.”

“On it, honey,” sighs a husband, turning for the house and returning less than thirty seconds later with a fistful of spoons. “Here we go.”

“Oh, no. Really?” My voice is muffled when Sumner pulls me up against his chest, wrapping his arms around me and kissing the crown of my head. “Can’t we wait until everyone is drunk?”

That gets a round of laughs out of the family, but no one heeds my suggestion. Sumner’s sister opens the passenger side door and unbuckles the soup, then drops the container unceremoniously on the trunk of my Honda. Pops off the lid.

“Should I go first?” she asks.

Sumner drags me in that direction, still locked in his arms. “No way.

My wife made that soup. I get the first bite.”

I bury my face in his chest, groaning. Therefore, I sense, rather than see, someone hand Sumner a spoon. I use one eye to peek as he dips the

utensil into the still–piping hot broccoli cheddar soup, bringing a giant-size bite to his mouth. I’m momentarily mesmerized by his long corded throat and how it flexes when he swallows, but then I’m zipped back to reality, because he’s laughing.

And I can’t help it. I kind of start laughing, too, because it’s a relief to have a verdict either way. Not to mention, this whole scene is bananas. I’m standing in the street with my in-laws, who I was never supposed to meet, but they have now become a broccoli cheddar soup focus group, and the fact that this meeting is so unconventional is easing my nerves in a way I couldn’t have expected. “It’s that bad?” I ask him, still laughing.